Unless you follow the legal press, you probably missed the employment odyssey of one Charlene Morisseau, formerly an attorney for DLA Piper, one of America's biggest law firms.

Ms. Morisseau, who is black, filed a federal lawsuit charging racial discrimination after being fired from the firm. Her lawsuit was dismissed earlier this month for reasons, as other bloggers have noted, that only served to validate the firm's decision to fire her. After firing her lawyers and stepping in to act as her own attorney, Ms. Morisseau, a graduate of Harvard Law School, blew filing deadlines, made frivolous motions and obstructed her deposition (according to the judge), and in an act of bewildering incompetence, styled one of her filings to place her case in the United States Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit (her case was still in district court).

The details are found in a story by Anthony Lin of the New York Law Journal.

Note that this story, rich in irony and damning for affirmative action, appears nowhere in the mainstream press. Beyond that, bloggers at overlawyered.com and abovethelaw.net picked up on it.

It will be easy for defenders of affirmative action to dismiss the tale of Ms. Morisseau: she was an aberration, the firm was trying to do the right thing by hiring her, she may have problems in her life unrelated to her race, and so on. But a Google search on Ms. Morisseau reveals that she is precisely the type of person big law firms today clamor for.

In 1998, she was the recipient of a "Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship," which from the looks of it appears to be restricted to non-whites.

(Its website says that only "New Americans" are eligible, defined as "an individual who (1) is a resident alien; i.e., holds a Green Card, or, (2) has been naturalized as a U.S. citizen, or (3) is the child of two parents who are both naturalized citizens." So, presumably, Ms. Morisseau falls into one of these three categories, in addition to being black. Doubly oppressed, then, or triply, if her gender holds her back.)

Here she is at Harvard, where, as president of the Black Law Students' Association, she protested the Amadou Diallo verdict, explaining that her brother was "bruised" by the police.

Here she is in the Harvard Law Review, presumably discussing the terrible calamities befalling minorities in the United States:

And according to the New York Law Journal article, Ms. Morisseau worked for a death-penalty defense group called the Southern Center for Human Rights, whom she's also suing for discrimination. Incredibly, her supervisor there, Steven B. Bright, submitted an affidavit to New York bar officials stating that she "appears unable to separate reality and fantasy" and described "vicious attacks" and "false allegations of outrageous conduct" she had made against many of the Center's lawyers and staff, all while "making virtually no contribution to the Center's work in the eight months she was here."

"All this reflects very poorly on the professional qualifications of Morisseau to practice law," Bright said in the affidavit, according to the NYLJ article.